About The King

A lot of people ask me what does MGD King mean? Well, it was a nickname given to me because I used to drink large quantities of Miller Genuine Draft. Someone mentioned to me that I was the King of MGD, and so it stuck.

If you’re like me you get annoyed at those little thumbs.db files that Windows has been leaving around every time you use Windows Explorer to view a folder. It really became frustrating when I was working on a project that parsed the contents of a directory to an XML file (more on that project later I hope!) and I kept seeing thumbs.db in my list! So I thought “there’s got to be a way to get rid of these things” and with a little bit of Googling I was able to use a couple of techniques to make it all go away.

First, open Folder Options and click on the “View” tab. Find “Display file icon on thumbnails” in Advanced Settings and uncheck it like the photo on the left.

Make sure you also uncheck “Hide protected operating system files (Recommended)” for this next step. Now search your drive for thumbs.db. After all of the results are found, press CTRL+A to select them all and then press the DELETE key. You may want to do this to all of your network drives and folders if you have any as well because they’re everywhere!

These thumbs.db files are like ants, don’t do much, and annoying as hell to get rid of but hopefully with this tip you’ll get rid of them and they’ll never come back, that is unless you have someone else who logs on to your computer and/or network and doesn’t know this.

Yes dear I've already done, but I'm worried about why I'm getting these files. I've searched 13,500 Thumbs.db files and delete those. But whenever I go into any folder I found Thumbs.db already there. So I think I need to refresh my Windows 7, because I've also modified gpedit.msc file, but all in vain. Anyways thanks for your kind reply.

Just wanted to say thanks, the tip worked great. One suggestion: you show two screenshots but only provide text instructions on one. I followed the text, got rid of the files, opened a folder and a new thumbs.db was immediately created. So I went back to your article and saw I didn't check "Always show icons, never thumbnails" because the text never said to do that. Once I checked that block and restarted explorer they have not returned. So, you may want to add some language to that effect. Also, and I am in no way connected to the company, there is a freeware tool out there called EVERYTHING.EXE by voidtools. I couldn't live without it. However, it is so much faster and so much better searching for files than windows search it will amaze you. It is NOT for finding data *IN* files like windows search, but for finding filenames on your hard drives and network drives, there is nothing that can beat it.

If you want to prevent Windows from caching the thumbnails altogether then you can edit your local group policy.

Click on Start, then Run and type in gpedit.msc or gpmc.msc
Browse to User Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Windows Explorer
Look for Turn off the caching of thumbnails in hidden thumbs.db files in the list
Once you find it, double click it to open its properties and then enable it and click Ok.